When the curtain fell on the Paris Summer Olympics last weekend, people from all over the world took note that the United States and China tied for first place with 40 gold medals each, leading the rest of the competing countries by quite a margin.
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Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who is best known for his 2017 book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, observed in The National Interest late last week, “China’s rise from essentially nowhere to become the leading rival of the United States in the Olympics mirrors its rise in virtually every other dimension to become the defining geopolitical rival in the [21st century].”
Allison got the point, but the analogy can go only so far. While competition in the Paris Olympics did not go much beyond accusations and counter accusations over doping controversies, the stakes in any geopolitical contest are incomparably higher as it entails loss of property and human lives. The ongoing war in Ukraine has painfully reminded us of this every day for the past two and half years.
The Chinese understand this, especially owing to their tradition of learning from history, which is all but tantamount to a religious belief in their culture. More than 2,000 years ago, legendary military strategist Sun Tzu, warned about the grave consequences of starting a war. “Warfare is of vital importance to a state,” he said in his classic work, The Art of War, adding, “It is a matter of life and death, a road to either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject which by no account can be neglected.”
Beijing knows that Washington’s path to hegemony cannot be copied. For one thing, there is no Second- or- Third Reich equivalent in today’s world to distract and exhaust America as the contemporary version of the British Empire. Today’s Russia is far from a historical equivalent given its total factor weakness.
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Beijing knows more acutely that even allowing for America’s global supremacy as a result of a series of fortunate events, Washington had been painfully patient about its fruition. By the late 19th century, America’s purchasing power parity had caught up with Britain’s. US gross domestic product was nearly triple that of Britain’s when World War I started, yet it did not take the baton of world hegemony till 1945. This also explains Beijing’s strategic forbearance, in both economic and military domains.
US senator Chuck Schumer meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on October 9, 2023: Photo: AFP/TNS/Getty Images
